Sanity Line

by Zachary Adam

  Prince had stood back somewhat, studying the relationship of the three-armed figure to the monoliths themselves, if there even was one. Scion liked Prince’s mask, probably because he’d designed it himself. Nice and plain, with nothing to really mark it out at all. A fitting departure from the glaringly unique masks of most of the known Grey Angels, which he was certain Prince appreciated. “I’m thinking.”

  Scion let him think on in silence, still convinced, in spite of probability, that there was something more to find here. Prince watched him poking around like a kid’s conception of how a detective behaved, before interrupting him with a non-sequitur. “You’re a medical expert, right? What happened in the outbreak?”

  “Well, see, that’s sort of the thing,” Sicon said, picking his way carefully back over to Niles, so as not to step on the lines, “Nobody can agree. We know the pathogen, and we know the vector of transmission that brought it into town

  in the first place, but those two details don’t agree. Personally, I think the outbreak was a weaponized pathogen. The local airfield had a weather station, which had an isolated rainwater collector that was monitored and drained. Even though the airfield was closed during the outbreak and that station wasn’t being actively monitored, a sample of rainwater from that collector was still contaminated.”

  “You can’t get sick from the rain, Doc.”

  “And yet, that was exactly what happened here.“

  Niles considered that for a moment, and then knelt, to get a photograph on his phone of the patch that caught his interest, when a sudden change in atmospheric tension drew his attention away.

  Scion turning sharply in another direction. Niles was baffled by the sudden outburst of what had looked like paranoia – every detail of the veteran Angel’s posture and action suggested flight-or-fight reaction, and Niles was surprised that Scion did not appear to be in any way armed.

  Calmly, he pushed the fringe of his grey overcoat aside, so that he could rest his hand on the grip of his snubnosed Special. “What is it?”

  He couldn’t see the smallest trace of threat, and then, suddenly, a Jersey barrier launched itself off of the nearby highway from a cause Niles could not see for lack of a proper line of sight. The shock of the moment froze the former detective in place. It was headed right for him. Scion remained a lucid participant in events. From the corner of his eye, Niles saw the man reach for his own neck with his left hand, sweeping in a broad gesture with his right. The barrier, now burning with violet balefire, suddenly and sharply altered course, now landing in the lawn far to their right.

  An improbably large figure appeared at the edge of the over-passing highway, and Prince brushed aside his own questions to clear leather on his snub-nosed revolver, which no longer seemed weapon enough.

  Answers could wait. Though he didn’t realize it just yet, the Battle of Anfangsburg had begun.

  --Crowe was an angel of judgment. His duty, for which he was well rewarded with all the decadences he could still imagine, with every whim satisfied, was nothing more than that. He was Glory’s standard-bearer, his judge, and, more often than not, his executioner.

  He was, by now, almost subsumed by his duty, the tattered remnants of his Super-Ego clinging to the barest awareness of his senses. He was a creature of the Id, entirely given to instinct and burdensome automata – a puppet in the hands of his god.

  What was left of that superego contrived to place a puzzled frown on his face as the block of concrete he had hurled suddenly burst into flame and threw itself into an entirely different path. The smaller of the little men down near the Seal – it had to be the seal, just look at it! – had done something. Some sort of magic, like Baha.

  Crowe snarled. He couldn’t abide that. Magic was for the weak.

  --It was the sound of rending concrete and iron that had set Vidcund into a run. The large figure had gotten his attention, but for some damn-fool reason, he’d written off the presence as a case of a hitchhiker and a bad sense of perspective.

  When he watched the man pitch the chunk of barricade like a damn softball, however, that got the Agent’s immediate and undivided attention. He still had, by his estimation, the better part of a kilometre to cover before he reached the figure, but anything that both could and would throw around parts of civil works was the sort of thing they paid him the big bucks to stop.

  Hell, for all he knew, that was the sort of thing he was made for. Identity match. His glasses flashed at him, throwing a highlight around a profile of the man’s face. Subject is Suspect A from the assault on the Abject facility.

  Vidcund pushed himself harder. He had forgotten about Abject, in all the later drama. That an enemy he had failed to vanquish before had finally appeared simply incensed him all the greater. Reaching into his coat as he ran, he plucked out his collapsible batons, flicking them outward to their full length with a practiced flourish.

  Bullets had failed to attract this man’s notice in the past, but Vidcund was willing to bet he still knew a trick or two.

  --

  When Subject 13 (MOSES I) was debriefed following the revelation of his identity, he commented that he was fully aware of his role in MOSES I, and had long suspected not just the existence of a MOSES II, but that Vidcund Därk (then an employee of Slipher Corporation) was the subject thereof.

  Subject 13 presents incredibly marked

  Teleneurological development, along with classic manifestations of psionic abilities including telekinetic and telepathic powers. For safety reasons, he has been forbidden all contact with Subject Därk until the completion of testing in MOSES II and the full extent of teleneural development in the same has been understood.

  --Niles was, above all other things, a practical man while sober. He had his principles, but was no paladin, allowing himself to set aside many of them when it was necessary. In this case, the immediate threat of the giant who had bounded down to meet them, strip of safety barrier

  clutched in hand, had allowed him to set aside his usual, principled curiosity. Scion had magic powers. Demonstrable paranormal abilities – the kind of thing that Archangel expounded and Niles had ridiculed. The revelation would bear stern questioning later. For now, however, there was a more pressing set.

  There was no difference for Niles, and never had been, between a paper target and a human being, when it was a question of public safety. That last part, he supposed, was all that really separated him from the truly depraved, from people like Archangel and the people the Angels preyed upon. As he set his left foot, and rose his weapon in both hands to line up that classical sight picture, the thought crossed his mind that maybe the distinction was only in his head.

  The first shot pounded out of the shortened barrel at a speed too great for Niles’ eyes to catch. He saw only the effects, a sudden reddening of the flesh of the attacker’s bare chest as the shot hit up and to the left of the breastbone. It was a perfect shot, should have been lethal in seconds, but the berserker didn’t so much as flinch. The second shot flared, and Niles fancied that he could see it exiting the barrel, a dark blur amidst flame. Scarlet blossomed from the shoulder, just above where the heart should have been.

  The target lowered his stance somewhat, for no other reason than to give balance as he raised the strip of steel he was wielding behind him, ready to strike. Niles instinctively knew he was out of the range of a swing, and so the third shot went out too. It carried a piece of the giant’s jawbone and probably a few of his teeth off into the distance with it, and garnered nothing more than a roar as Crowe raised his weapon in a high, over-theshoulder arc.

  As Niles darted to the left, he felt the strangest

  compulsion, turning abruptly on a heel and running at something of a backward angle. His left hand left its supporting position on the grip – even running around, he’d have to be blind not to be able to hit a target that size one-handed – diving into his pocket to get a hold of the car keys. Shots four and five poured out one right after the other, but Niles didn�
��t look to see what he had hit – or even if the giant was still focusing his aggression on him. He was too busy slotting the keys into the lock on the trunk, and throwing the trunk open, not entirely sure why he had.

  As instinctively as he had known to do that, he knew to take one giant step to the left. Scion suddenly turned his gaze toward the car. Niles marvelled at seeing him, this frail geneticist, his hands upraised to block a blow from the steel beam that never quite touched him before glancing away. James Derrida was not a big man, and while the inhuman masks of the Grey Angels tended to give them an imposing quality, they did nothing to amplify your physical intimidation.

  Scion lowered a hand toward the car, and beckoned, and Niles understood why he had stepped aside as a cloud of tiny, glowing ball-bearings fired from the trunk as though by a shotgun. As the swarm turned in the air and closed in on the giant, Prince suddenly realized why Scion’s face was a sea of stars.

  --Crowe felt himself lifted and thrown. It had been a long time since anything like that had happened to him, he realized dimly. He bounced off the pavement, sliding for a while, buffing his back on its sandpaper surface.

  It was difficult to say how badly he was injured, because he wouldn’t have called it badly at all. He had the strength and constitution of his God, and could feel that being shifting around inside of him, a hundred little fingers stitching up his wounds.

  He chuckled darkly as he stood back up, as effortlessly as a creature of his size could be expected to. He had, after all, absorbed a great deal of the shrapnel that Scion had thrown at him.

  “Tiny little man… you’re all out of tricks.”

  --Vidcund mounted the metal barrier that separated careless drivers from the fifteen foot drop off of the overpass as effortlessly as he might have turned a corner. Running was a matter of placing one foot in front of the other, speed granted you balance, and precision was the name of his game.

  In his passing, the Deviant had bent a considerable portion of the rest of the barrier outward, in the same direction he had been travelling, before it had snapped off to give him his weapon. Vidcund could get a little more lead time this way.

  At the end of the barrier, he planted both of his feet. Inertial mass and his weight dragged the point of the break downward. Spring action brought it back upward, and, being functionally lighter at rest than he was when he was fast, Vidcund was propelled skyward.

  He dropped from the sky like a lancer, coming in from high, landing hard and fast with his leading leg between the Deviant’s shoulder blades, and letting his momentum do the rest. That momentum carried him forward, into a roll across the shoulder that left him on his feet even as Crowe was picking himself back up off of the ground. The drama of the Grey Angels feel into his periphery as the two squared off, and Vidcund’s familiar firearms appeared from under his jacket.

  --At some point during the testing process of MOSES II, the Subjects achieved total collectivity. The precise mechanism was not studied completely, or else the records were lost. Shortly after reporting this collective awareness, Subject 001 attempted to resign from his position with Slipher Corporation, resulting in [7 Pages Redacted].

  When Agency completed its investigation, it was confirmed that Subject 001 was the only surviving Project MOSES II clone. He was sedated and treated with heavy amnesiacs, before being transferred to Orbital Site 17A. Further testing is scheduled and organized under the name of Project AEGIS.

  --The fall of Därk, and his suicidal leap, had knocked the weapon from Crowe’s hand, causing it to fall over sideways, severely damaging the front end of the car. Niles heard James wince behind Scion’s mask – that had been his money that paid the rental fee, and making the insurance claim would not be easy, given that the man who had rented it was dead in the 80s.

  To his surprise, however, he watched Scion hurrying away, jogging down the road that passed under the highway. If for no other reason than a general lack of understanding how he would be able to fight the giant if his revolver was useless, Prince tucked the weapon under his jacket and turned to follow.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  James glanced at him, and gestured for the man to speed up. “There are exactly two things in town that are of any significance. We were just at the first.”

  “Right, with the monster, and the Agency assassin.” They paused. They were at an intersection anyway, and James wanted to look back at the fray without his mask on for a bit of a better view. “Right. One of two things is going to happen. Mister Bond flattens the monster and then his friends show up and they secure the area, and everyone in it. Or the monster wins, and starts tearing apart the monument. He’s there to destroy it.”

  “How do you know that?” Niles asked, watching Scion replace his mask and break back into a jog.

  “The same way you knew to open the trunk for me. Come on. We’re going to Anfangsburg Tower.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s where Vidcund Därk was going, before he saw us,” James said quietly, “and I want to know why.” “So, why aren’t we waiting to find out why?”

  “Monster can’t win,” James said peacefully, turning down a row of homes whose peeling paint and broken windows marked them as abandoned. “And I don’t care to try our luck with someone who already tried killing you once.”

  Scion stole one last glance toward Därk. The Agent had a familiar quality about him… something James saw only rarely, and only in men very much like himself. And yet, that same slippery otherness was as alien as anything the man had ever seen.

  --Crowe was getting frustrated. He had barely stood when that impact from behind had flattened him against the ground again, and while he was happy that whatever had struck him seemed to have bounded off again, that didn’t take away the annoyance of having to pick himself up. The Blessing of Glory had made Crowe grandiose and mighty, but his impossible, inhuman bulk did him no favours when it came to speed or agility.

  After all, he thought, wasn’t Glory so mighty that he need not engage his enemies in combat, but merely exterminate them? What obstacle could be so great as to not be removed?

  He picked himself up off of the ground, snarling somewhat. The skin across his great, claw-like hands contracted until the sharpened points of his phalanges emerged.

  Why, it was the little man from the Abject Facility… the one who had so arrogantly presumed to give him orders!

  He would, certainly, enjoy this.

  --Vidcund registered only peripherally as the other combatants in the fight broke away. He trusted in the ability of his glasses to have recorded their faces, possibly even identifying them for later follow up. After all, this was the sort of thing Agency covered up on a more regular basis than you might have guessed.

  He continued a few paces forward before abruptly rising up onto the balls of his feet and pivoting, hard, transmitting his momentum into the ground through his heels.

  As he watched the Reality Deviant lift itself up from the ground, he was less surprised to see it changing than he was surprised to see how similar it remained. Mutationin-vivo had been observed, however improbable as it seemed under classical understandings of biology, but it was usually on such a grand scale as to render the creatures affected unrecognizable, as the body of Professor Johansson in his apartment bathtub had been.

  But this suspect was… surprisingly human-looking. True, his arms were now too long, and his body entirely too large in general. Vidcund half suspected that broad, under-biting jaw with its carnivorous array of teeth wasn’t the product of standard Darwinian mechanisms, either. The only sign of anything that wasn’t simply a

  modification of existing organs were the strange, twisting things beneath the surface of the man’s skin, rapidly swarming to fill and seal the voids Vidcund’s rounds had punched in the creature. Though he had spare ammunition, the agent did not avail himself of it. He took two or three steps backward, almost-casually, as he holstered the han
dguns, drawing out instead his collapsible batons.

  He could hear Crowe’s skin stretching, groaning as it retracted across the man’s fingers, and that deep, guttural chuckle.

  “Are you scared, little mortal?” Vidcund allowed himself a slight roll of the eyes, as his thumbs depressed the small switches in the grip of his batons that electrified them. “Not particularly.”

  It was, after all, just another day at the office.

  --Slipher Corporation records suggest that a certain number of MOSES II clones can be allowed to safely “synchronize”, allowing the dominant personality in the group to integrate with the minds of the lesser members of the “unit”. This renders the said lesser individuals as semiautonomous drones, capable of basic tasks but ultimately taking their cues from the master, who may even be giving them subconsciously.

  However, Dr. Crantz goes on to theorize that there is an upper “safe” boundary for such integration, a critical mass at which the dominant personality attempts to override the others entirely, resulting in [DATA EXPUNGED], which Crantz blames for overriding Subject 001’s neuroconditional limitation, resulting in the Anfangsburg Tower incident.

  Before this, the preAgency records suggest that Subject 001 underwent a period of psychosis, with symptoms including [2 Pages Redacted].

  --

  Vidcund was tired, had been tired, would probably forever be tired, and from what he could tell, the creature showed no sign of slackening its assault upon him. Sweat had once glistened on his brow and now glazed it in an evaporated, mineral slick, his body having decided there was no moisture left to spare for such a petty concern as thermoregulation. Even if it weren’t for the blinking icons in the corners of his vision, he would know the batteries in his batons were wearing down. The vivid coronal threat-display the weapons generated had long since fallen silent, sparing its charge only for the moment of contact.